Disambiguating Faith: How Just Opposing Faith, In Principle, Means You Actually Don't Have Faith, In Practice

Popular atheism in America celebrates versions of naturalism, materialism, empiricism, and so on, that are often based on weak arguments or even on no arguments at all. Popular atheism in America is already faith – and I’m sympathetic to the Christians who refer to it as such. Unfortunately, popular atheism is often just as scientifically illiterate and closed-minded as the worst Christianity. I love it when an atheist tells me that our universe is all that exists. I like to ask: How do you know? What’s your argument? And I have yet to meet a single atheist who can answer those questions.

Popular atheism is not a faith position. What Eric is encountering are inarticulate, under-informed, or conceptually confused atheists (or maybe in some cases only atheists who happen to disagree with him). But none of that amounts to adopting a faith, either implicitly or explicitly. The salient connotations of the word faith, as it relates to manners of believing among modern Western religious people and as it is denounced by contemporary popular atheism, must be clearly distinguished from other instances of believing with no argument, or based on weak arguments, wrong arguments, or appeals to authority, etc. Someone can be wrong or argue badly or defer to authorities without having an analogue of the kind of religious faith which is at issue in debates about the justification of religious beliefs and practices.

In this and my next posts, I will lay out some of the relevant features of religious faith which are crucially missing from popular atheist forms of belief and whose absence makes accusing most atheists of faith a matter of false, unfair, and misleading equivalence. The first point is simple: Atheists explicitly reject faith as a source of justification for beliefs.

Now, just because a group denies they do something does not of itself mean they are not guilty of that very thing. Atheists might still have some kind of implicit faith. But in the case of robust modern Western religious faith, one of its distinguishing features is that it involves a willingness to explicitly, deliberately, and as a matter of virtue believe things which are under-supported by evidence or counter-indicated by evidence.

Often faith even goes an eggregious step further and involves a commitment to ignore or rationalize away all future counter-evidence. The chosen nature of religious faith is an essential ingredient distinguishing it from other kinds of unstable beliefs and is one of the most important parts of the atheist critique of it.

Insofar as the contemporary atheist insists that faith is a vice and not a virtue, something to be rooted out of oneself rather than cultivated in oneself, she is already doing something different than the religious faith adherent. If she is nonetheless guilty of shoddily apportioning her beliefs to evidence you can at least call her on that and by her own avowed principles she will be forced to either come up with better evidence, soften her commitment to her belief, abandon her position outright, or be charged with an intellectual/moral hypocrisy. By contrast, if you point out that the religious person is not apportioning his belief to evidence properly but rather granting himself whatever beliefs he likes purely on faith his principles allow him to take this as a compliment!

In short faith of the modern religious kind denounced by atheists cannot be had by accident. It involves acts of volition which enable religious people to treat it as a matter of special commendation and justifies atheists in treating it as a morally culpable thing religious people have control to stop doing. And I don’t know of any representative atheist types who would put volitional faith in the virtue category rather than the vice one.

To elide this fundamental difference in epistemic principles and equivocate by imputing to “faith” to both people is deeply unfair to the atheist.

But even if the atheist’s rejection of explicit faith is significant, might the average contemporary atheist have enough “implicit faith” to nonetheless be guilty of the charge of faith? I think not. But I will save my arguments against generally treating wrong, weak, and missing arguments as faith positions for other posts. I will also defend atheists against the charge of holding naturalism, materialism, and empiricism by faith.

Your Thoughts?

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For more on faith, read any or all posts in my “Disambiguating Faith” series (listed below) which strike you as interesting or whose titles indicate they might answer your own questions, concerns, or objections having read the post above. It is unnecessary to read all the posts below to understand any given one. They are written to each stand on their own but also contribute to a long sustained argument if read all together.

Dr. Daniel Fincke has his PhD in philosophy from Fordham University and spent 11 years teaching in college classrooms. He wrote his dissertation on Ethics and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. On Camels With Hammers, the careful philosophy blog he writes for a popular audience, Dan argues for atheism and develops a humanistic ethical theory he calls “Empowerment Ethics”. Dan also teaches affordable, non-matriculated, video-conferencing philosophy classes on ethics, Nietzsche, historical philosophy, and philosophy for atheists that anyone around the world can sign up for. (You can learn more about Dan’s online classes here.) Dan is an APPA (American Philosophical Practitioners Association) certified philosophical counselor who offers philosophical advice services to help people work through the philosophical aspects of their practical problems or to work out their views on philosophical issues. (You can read examples of Dan’s advice here.) Through his blogging, his online teaching, and his philosophical advice services each, Dan specializes in helping people who have recently left a religious tradition work out their constructive answers to questions of ethics, metaphysics, the meaning of life, etc. as part of their process of radical worldview change.

http://nojesusnopeas.blogspot.com James Sweet

Eric’s position seems to be that everybody in the entire world should be a philosophy major, or else they aren’t allowed to think anything.

http://www.ericsteinhart.com Eric Steinhart

Of course I’d love it if everybody in the entire world would be a philosophy major! And if they’re not, then I’d encourage them to think as much as possible. Maybe that way, they’ll become philosophy majors!

http://nojesusnopeas.blogspot.com James Sweet

I happen to think every educated adult should understand the basics of calculus. I don’t think they need to be able to actually do derivatives and integrals, but they should at least understand what they are, i.e. that it is possible to derive a function that describes the rate of change of another function, and vice-versa. Frankly, I think having that concept that is pretty fundamental to understanding how reality actually works.

Eric, what’s your calc background like?

http://nojesusnopeas.blogspot.com James Sweet

By the way, I’m still waiting to hear if Eric knows any calculus. If you don’t, then you are just as qualified to be driving a car as “popular” atheists are qualified to be promoting naturalism. :p

Daniel Fincke

Eric has a math and computer science background and teaches Philosophy of Math. He also published a book titled “More Precisely: The Math You Need To Do Philosophy” He knows calculus.